When adults compare themselves to “kids today,” two somewhat opposing views tend to happen at once. There’s both rose-colored nostalgia (“the ’90s were a simpler time!” “let’s go back to before we had screens!”) and a sense of superiority when it comes to facing challenges (“kids today are soft!” “I had to walk to school uphill in the snow both ways!”).
Regarding the latter, perhaps a lot of that can be attributed to a cultural shift that’s more child-centered. This has led to a quantifiable increase in the number of “sheltered” kids, according to a new Harris Poll. Kids who never walked along in a grocery aisle, talked with a neighbor without their parents, walked/biked somewhere (without a chaperone…certainly nothing like the childhood many of us ’70s/’80s/’90s kids grew up in.
This sparked a conversation among Gen Xers and Millennials on TikTok when someone asked, “What’s something we survived as kids that would absolutely emotionally destroy today’s kids?” Woo boy, did folks deliver. Dodgeballs flying at their face, handwriting words in cursive for hours on end, waiting weeks to get back terrible pictures…no one today could handle that. And those are just some of the examples. Keep reading for more.
1. “Going all day at school without a water bottle. We might get a small drink of water from the water fountain at recess, that’s it. Take away a younger person’s water bottle today for five minutes, and they act like they’ve been in the desert for three days without a drop of water and will die of dehydration.”
2. “Having to talk to people to get your questions answered. For everything.” — meanwhile, I’ve seen today’s kids have full-blown panic attacks simply about having to ask a waiter, “May I please get a cheeseburger?”
3. “No binge mode. If you wanted to watch The X-Files, you had to be in the house every Friday night while everyone partied. For four years.”
“If you missed your episode, you might never see it.”
3. “Having to encounter everything ‘by chance.’ Favorite song on the radio, favorite movie on TV… made it so much more rewarding, but we’ll never experience that emotion again. Like running into a friend out in the wild.”
4. “Munching on snacks at 1 am watching Faces of Death.”
For those unfamiliar, Faces of Death is a 1978 American horror film that shows scenes of gruesome deaths from around the world, both real and re-enacted. Fun, right?
5. “Dodgeball. I just played gaga ball with a bunch of Generation Alphas and omg, these kids are not gonna be okay.”
What is gaga ball, you ask? A variation that’s gentler, faster-paced, and more accessible. It’s Dodgeball Lite, essentially. And honestly, it’s a legitimate improvement from the needlessly savage original.
6. “Having to write everything in cursive from third grade on in pen. Writing by hand the rough draft, then the 2nd rough draft, then the final draft.”
Man, lots of thoughts about handwriting, actually…
“Having to write a research paper while properly citing sources in the required format using only books, newspapers or microfiche from the library. And having to find all that by using the Dewey Decimal System. Also, no spell or grammar check to find our mistakes for us.”
“Having to write a rough draft, having a classmate mark it up with errors, re-write it for the teacher to review with more mark-ups, and then having to write the final draft in pen, sometimes in cursive lol.”
“That bump on the side of your middle finger from handwriting everything.”
7. “Being bored. Kids today don’t know what real boredom is.”
More specifically…
8. “Driving with your parent with NO FORM of entertainment. Just look out the window.”
Even worse…
9. “Being trapped in the car with your smoker parents… with windows up. And of course, zero functioning seat belts.”
10. “Babysitting infants and other small children when you yourself were only 12.”
11. “Not being able to see the photographs before they get developed when using disposable cameras/rolls of film in the little black tubes.”
12. “Dial-up internet and how it disconnected when someone else made a phone call.”
13. “Driving without using GPS.”
“Or when MapQuest was a thing and we had to print out directions to follow! I drove cross country with twenty pages of directions hahahaha.”
14. “Trying to follow makeup tutorials that were just blocks of text in Cosmo magazine. No visuals. “
15. “Forgetting your key and having to wait from 3:45 pm until 6:00 pm when your mom finally gets home. No snacks, no water.”
16. “Eating whatever is served, regardless of whether you like it or hate it. There was no asking what we wanted to eat for dinner or what sounded good to us. Nasty pot pie with peas? Eat it. Liver and onions that smell like absolute death? Eat it. And you ain’t getting down from the table until your plate is clean — and they meant it. It could be all the way until bedtime. You not getting down. Period. My sister fell asleep face-first into her plate once.”
17. “Having to find a library book through the card catalog to know its location.”
18. “Calling your friend’s house and talking to their parents first when they pick up the phone. Small talk and communication skills in general have taken a huge hit.”
19. “Pooping without a phone.”
20. “The TV used to cut to nothing at night. literally the TV would just show the flag ’til the next day… Good night, America.”
21. “You only got three lives in a video game, and when you died, you had to start from the very beginning!!”
22. “Blowing and smacking Nintendo games to make them work or not glitch.”
23. “Having homework from all classes due the next day! “
24. “Having to rewind a cassette tape with a pencil after being unraveled inside the cassette player, hoping it doesn’t twist while rewinding.”
25. “Those metal pedals on our bikes, hitting your shin cause you missed the pedal or riding with no shoes on.”
26. “Having to cover all textbooks with paper bags from the local grocery store. The paper bags had outlines on how to cover your textbooks. Hated this for years. It eventually stopped in high school, possibly 11th grade.”
27. “Actually going to a potential employer to ask if they’re hiring and for an application.”
28. “The loud ticking of the massive analog clock on the wall during a test. The whole room silent. But the ticking of clock as loud as a rock concert. Every second click click click. I can still hear it in my nightmares. You know y’all younginz can’t tell time unless it’s digital.”
29. “When I was in elementary school, lunch was still paid for with cash UNLESS you were a poor kid with free lunch. Then, they gave you a bright yellow laminated card and everyone in your class knew you were poor. “
30. “Blackouts. They will NEVER survive blackouts the way we did back then.”
31. “Chickenpox!”
32. “Not knowing if The Blair Witch Project was real or not.”
33. “Roman candle fights.”
Ah yes, pointing fireworks at each other. What could possibly go wrong?
34. “Climbing and falling off six-foot monkey bars onto plain concrete.”
35. “The merry-go-round…pure steel in the summer.”
36. “The threat of pulling 20 to life for my LimeWire bootlegs. The media had me feeling like young Capone.”
37. “Thinking the world will end when Y2K comes.”
38. “Computer crashing while just putting the finishing touches on your school report and you didn’t hit save.”
39. “Having to manually change the channel on the TV and if the knob broke looking frantically for pliers!!! Don’t get me started on the aluminum foil on the TV antennas!”
40. “I was home alone in the morning and got myself fed, dressed and walked myself to afternoon Kindergarten.”
41. “Non-stop bullying was normal. “
42. “Riding in the back of a pickup truck down the highway.”
43. “A dentist that doesn’t numb your gums before jabbing you with a needle.”
44. “Having that ONE copy of the video you and your friends made, greatest memories ever, and then your dad tapes over it for a 90-second Tyson fight.”
…and lastly…
45. “The Challenger Explosion, and no trauma counseling after. We were expected to just move on to the next class and go about our day.”
That said, we can probably all agree that in reality, kids today endure plenty—we didn’t exactly have to contend with active shooter drills, cyberbullying, etc.—and are incredibly resilient in their own way. This was more lighthearted than anything else. Or, at the very least, a fun and traumatic romp down memory lane for us olds.
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